Here's an article by Mark Crovelli.
This guy sums it perfectly. This dovetails nicely with the point I was trying to make in the Cult piece.
It upsets people, but when they say, "Aren't you thankful they're over there defending our freedom?" I reply, "I'm thankful for the freedom I still have IN SPITE OF what they're doing over there."
Increasingly I feel like we're living out Gibbon's Decline and Fall....
I guess it's no surprise the Christians want a new Constantine to remedy the ills of Empire.
Here's the article and the link:
Kiss Honor and Morality Goodbye in the U.S. Armed Forces
by Mark R. Crovelli
Question: What kind of people do you think will be attracted to the American military, now that it is common knowledge that the armed forces will only tolerate soldiers who keep their mouths shut about serious crimes, and that politicians in Washington want to hang or assassinate soldiers who conscientiously expose serious crimes? The answer, of course, is that only the moral scum of the nation will be attracted to this profession in the future, since only the most morally bankrupt and intellectually challenged among us would ever voluntarily allow themselves to be put in a position where they would have to choose between abetting serious crimes or being hanged.
The depraved chickenhawks in Washington who are calling for Bradley Manning to be executed (without so much as even a show trial), and for Julian Assange to be assassinated (even though he is an Australian citizen), ought to be aware that their calls for human blood will have serious consequences for this country. They may think that they are only blustering and posturing in order to get themselves reelected, which is their singular purpose in life of course, but announcing to the nation that military whistleblowers ought to be executed sends a powerful message. To morally conscientious Americans, the message is: The American military is a place where men are expected to lie about or cover up war crimes and felonies, or where they will be hanged if they do what their consciences dictate. To depraved and sociopathic Americans, the message is: Whoopie! The armed forces are a place where men can commit all the crimes they want without any fear of exposure! Bonanza!
The effect that these perverse incentives will have on military recruiting is so obvious that even hysterical, pea-brained politicians ought to be able to foresee it. Good and honorable men will choose not to enlist, while depraved and sociopathic men will. The U.S. armed forces – the guys with all the big guns and nukes in America – will gradually be filled solely with scumbags and degenerates who are all too happy to have politicians punishing whistleblowers on their behalf. And remember, we’re not talking about a profession as harmless as the teamsters or plumbers becoming a refuge for the depraved – we’re talking about a profession that involves automatic weapons, killer robot planes, tanks and nuclear weapons.
The effect of these politicians’ calls for blood will be equally as perverse on any good men who are currently enlisted in the armed forces. Soldiers are being told, in essence, that their oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States is completely null and void, and that they are subject to a new oath that they never knew about. The new oath, which none of them ever swore, says that soldiers must hide or keep silent about crimes being committed in their midst or especially by their superiors. Should they violate this unstated oath, politicians and generals will call for their execution. The message is clear to both good soldiers and degenerate ones: If you so much as let out a squeak because of your conscience, everyone in the government, from the President on down, will try to get you hanged. How do you like them apples?
It is no use to object that soldiers still have the opportunity to simply go to their superiors to report crimes, and keep everything in the chain of command. When the crimes are being committed by the very top of the military establishment and executive branch, how reasonable is it to expect a PFC to go to his superiors and say "Hi there, I’d like to report that all levels of the military-congressional-executive-industrial complex are engaging in outright deception and overt crimes – sometimes even heinous war crimes. Is there a form I should fill out to get them indicted, or what?" Any soldier that naïve belongs in an asylum. Things are far worse now, however, since conscientious soldiers cannot even find refuge in leaking the crimes to the American people without the politicians trying to hang them. They will shut up for good now and watch the crimes expand.
Nor is it any use to object that soldiers have no right to question the decisions of their superiors and leak documents that are above their heads. In the first place, American soldiers are, first and foremost, Americans, and their only duty is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States. If this is not their purpose, then what in the hell are we paying them for? That is why they took an oath to defend the Constitution and protect the country from threats foreign and domestic. They did not take an oath to do whatever Hilary Clinton and Robert Gates want, and then help them to cover up their lies and crimes. They serve America and Americans, not the current political and military establishment.
The future looks bleak for America with a military in this state of moral decay. When soldiers do not object to invading foreign countries that never attacked us, and do not object to bombing and shooting foreign civilians, it is a symptom of serious moral decay already well advanced in the armed forces. When politicians tell soldiers that any dissent or leaking of the truth will be punished by hanging, it is a symptom that a country will shortly degenerate into a totalitarian nightmare. It is a sign that the American armed forces have finally and totally given up on defending the people of America, (if they ever did), and are on the way to becoming the largest gang of Brown Shirts the world has ever seen.
May God protect us all from this group of people whose allegiance is to secrecy, immoral war, and lying politicians, instead of to defending the people of the United States. Better yet, may anarchy protect us all from this nightmarish future!
December 14, 2010
Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.